So I was just wondering how you guys found all the lovely Japanese fanart sites that you linked here? For that matter, how people of any anime fandom at all actually find any Japanese fanart. I know all too well how much purdy art fans can miss, by only visiting "regular" sites. I know I never would've seen great sites like Garakuta's, or Mint Electic, or skygauge07, without people recommending 'em to me.
So...how did they find these sites in the first place? :unsure:
Let's see... I didn't do it for FFVII (for some odd reason), but I used to go hunting high and low for Japanese fanart sites for SaGa Frontier (because the game is hated by virtually all of English gamerdom).
What I did was to follow any Japanese links off English fanart pages. Some of the latter occasionally link to their favourite Japanese artists, so I followed that. I don't know how popular they are now, but back in the day *uncreaks joints, smokes pipe* webrings were all the rage. Every Japanese site I went to was a member of several webrings.
Those webrings are pretty easy to identify, so I'd find the ones about fanart. The rings were written completely in Japanese, but it's always clear where you need to click. I'd go through the list of websites linked from the ring. Yes, every single one of them. I was desperate. My bishie HAD to have fanart SOMEWHERE. -_-
Even though all the websites were in Japanese, their URLs were usually in English. I'd follow anything linked to a page called "Garelly.html" :razz: After I'm done plundering that site, it's just a matter of following more links from its links page. I was so desperate keen that I'd end up with three rows of condensed windows at once (remember, at the same time, I'm still going through the webring and going through every single link on that links page).
Then my computer will suddenly shove the keyboard up my---, IE will get an error and all those windows will close. And I cry. :mellow:
So that's my story. *ISNOTAGEEK* I've lost countless Japanese links over god-knows-how-many reformats, but it never fails everytime I attempt it again. :lol: